A new look for Confluence Home

[#1]

Hi Confluence Community,

My name is Ned, and I'm a Product Manager on the Confluence team. We’re excited to announce that in the next few months we’ll be rolling out a brand new look on Confluence Home, in order to make the experience more intuitive and user friendly for all of our customers.

How’s it look?

Some highlights include:

• Tidying things up - removing the profile and nav background

• Iconography - updating the iconography in the nav and feed

• Pills - moving Announcements, Calendar, and Forge apps sections into the feed as pills

• Cards - moving to a six card grid layout for the ‘Pick Up Where You Left Off’ section

• Polish - rounding out borders and fixing drop shadows & rounded corners

Thanks and we look forward to hearing from you,

Tom Marra + Erika Joun + Samyak Singh (Engineering)
Joel Unger + Julie Kuang (Design)
Ned Lindau (Product Manager)

[Andy Gladstone]

@Ned Lindau personally I use the [Your Space] shortcut from the profile section on the home page A LOT. This will be something that I know I will miss. Can it be listed at the top of the starred spaces on the left pane?

Will tasks have an icon for the number of open tasks as it does today?

Will announcements now be hidden behind a pill that needs to be selected to view them? If so, that will be a degradation as announcements are something admins want everyone to see on the page rather than needing to 'discover' them by clicking on something.

[Ned Lindau]

@Andy Gladstone thanks for the feedback! Responses in line:

> personally I use the [Your Space] shortcut from the profile section on the home page A LOT. This will be something that I know I will miss. Can it be listed at the top of the starred spaces on the left pane?

Appreciate the suggestion here; we'll definitely take it into consideration as we make a few final changes. Agree that having persistent access to your personal Space is important.

> Will tasks have an icon for the number of open tasks as it does today?

Yep, it should! Are you not seeing a counter next to the menu item? Here's what I see:

> Will announcements now be hidden behind a pill that needs to be selected to view them? If so, that will be a degradation as announcements are something admins want everyone to see on the page rather than needing to 'discover' them by clicking on something.

I hear you. This should be sticky. Could you try navigating to the tab you find more useful, closing your tab, and then reopening? Please tell me if it is not taking you back to your last selected tab.

[Andy Gladstone]

@Ned Lindau I don't have access to this new Home Page in my instance yet. I was asking questions based on the screenshot in your post. 

[Ned Lindau]

Got it — thanks for the clarification. Looking forward to your feedback once you get access!

[Ivan Lima]

Looks good. I've transitioned most of my personal knowledge management content to Confluence Cloud. It's great to see big and "small" improvements coming through more frequently and well crafted. While it's designed to meet large enterprises' requirements, Confluence is maturing in its usability to accommodate smaller audiences and even for personal use with very low friction. Great job.

[Ned Lindau]

Nice, thanks for the feedback, @Ivan Lima! 

[Nicole Shepherd]

The loss of the Announcements featured as a separate entity is definitely an unwelcome surprise. 

[Andy Gladstone]

@Ned Lindau why do all of the tiles display a scroll icon? I have this across all Home Pages on instances I am a part of. Seems like a bug.

[Ned Lindau]

@Andy Gladstone thanks for reporting. We’re unable to reproduce this error after multiple attempts. Is there any chance you have an extension or something that could be the culprit?

[Barbara Szczesniak]

@Ned Lindau I believe that @Andy Gladstone is talking about the icon at the right of the page name. I also have this in my instance. Clicking on it opens that page.

[Andy Gladstone]

@Barbara Szczesniak is 100% correct. That is exactly what I was referring to. Why is it necessary? It looks like a scroll icon, when you cannot scroll anywhere. And the tile itself is clickable. so no icon is needed for that eitther. 

[Ned Lindau]

Yep, understood that the scroll icons are what Andy was referring to. We are unable to reproduce this within Atlassian. @Barbara Szczesniak can you confirm that you are seeing this as well? Are you and @Andy Gladstone using any marketplace apps or browser extensions?

[Barbara Szczesniak]

@Ned Lindau The screenshot I included is from my site, so, yes, I am seeing this as well. I have no marketplace apps. The only browser extension I have in Chrome is the Adobe Acrobat extension. I also see the scroll icon in Edge, where AFAIK I have no browser extensions.

[Andy Gladstone]

@Ned Lindau we do have a few Marketplace Apps installed in our instance, but I don't see why any should affect the UX and design of these tiles. I entered the site in Incognito Mode on Chrome (to eliminate the browser extensions from affecting the site) and have the same experience - the scroll icons are still there.

[Ned Lindau]

@Barbara Szczesniak & @Andy Gladstone thanks to your help, we've gotten to the bottom of it: We're pretty sure this is a Windows problem (please let me know if either of you is NOT using Windows). We're working on a fix. Stay tuned, and thanks again for bringing this to my attention!

[Steve]

@Ned Lindau by "Pills - moving Announcements, Calendar, and Forge apps sections into the feed as pills" are you saying that Forge apps will be able to do something like this:

Could you please share a link to the Forge documentation that explains it.

[Mikael Sandberg]

Hi @Ned Lindau,

How do you edit the announcements now that it has moved under its own pill? And do agree with @Andy Gladstone and others that it should still be its own section. Being sticky is one thing, but if users do not have an habit to look at the announcements, or not using the home page at all, they may miss something important.

[Ms. Hiller]

I miss the easy access to personal space.